'I wanted sex on my terms, and it was'

I see people freak out over them being virgins and thought this article in The Guardian might help. It's about people who lost their virginity in their 30's. It'll remind the virgins 30's or under that they'll not alone.

Here's an extract from it:

Sarah lost her virginity when she was 31, about six months into her marriage. She and her husband were devout Mormons, and she describes the church as considering extramarital sex as a sin secondary only to murder. After decades of sexual repression, Sarah found the transition to having sex post-wedding hard: “My mind was still quite closed on it.” She was diagnosed with vaginismus – which the NHS describes as the body’s automatic reaction to the fear of vaginal penetration.

Their marriage lasted 10 years; Sarah eventually left her husband, whom she came to see as a bully. She subsequently left the church, too – which she had been a member of since she was nine years old. Many of her former Mormon friends still have hangups about sex, she says, and she was determined not to rank among them.

In her 40s, she says: “I decided I wasn’t going to live with sexually repressed thinking. I worked hard, I read articles and books, I completely rethought my view on sexuality.”

She had a one-night stand, a same-sex experience and read books with titles such as The Good Girl’s Guide to Bad Girls’ Sex and Sex Tips for Straight Women from a Gay Man (both of which she recommends). It was “exciting and terrifying and confusing and enlightening”, she says. “You hear people say: ‘I wish I’d known what I know now when I was a teenager’ – I kind of did it like that, the wrong way round. I had my teenage years in my 40s.”

Sarah is now 56 and describes sex as “just delightful”. There don’t seem to have been “any lasting effects” from her slower-than-average start in sex. “My understanding of the world and myself is that sex is a very natural, normal part of life. I think I’m kind of regular, boring, normal – not that I actually believe there is a normal.”

Sarah’s advice to a struggling older virgin is not to jump on dating apps, but to work on their self-confidence and “understand their relationship with themselves”.